Science
Theory of Gravity?
Feb 24th
The theory of Gravity is still just that, a theory. Like all mysteries of the world I like to wonder why with all the brains in this world there is still no solid answers to obvious questions like what is gravity and how is it caused. I have many other questions but for now let’s stick on this topic. Before I start I also would like to say this is my Theory and I have not trouble shooted, cross-checked, or contacted Einstein from the grave to get a professional second opinion.
The first popular theory of gravity was Isaac Newton’s theory which is based on the amount of mass is what defines the strength of gravity. So the more dense a object the more gravity it has. In this theory all particles and asteroids in space and all particles and objects here on earth have gravity. The amount of gravity is depending on their density.
Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity is based on space and time working together to shift the fabric of that moment. Somehow the in-balance of time and space creates a vacuum that connects objects together.
Charles Yarbrough’s theory of gravity is something new but growing on the internet. My theory is that gravity is created by the core of planets. In the center of our planet is a spinning core that to this day has no popular explanation to why it exists. I believe simply as planets die the core dies and gravity dies down.
My contest to Newton:
If density was the main reason for gravity then the largest planet Jupiter would have more matter gravitating around it. But as we all know Saturn has the rings of matter gravitating around it. I think simply Saturn has a bigger more active core.
Another example is the size of the SUN, it’s huge compared to the earth and in matter much more dense. So if density was the only factor for gravity then the Sun would suck us into it about a million times over. I think more logically the Sun is a core just like what’s in each planet and slowly losing it’s power hence why mars was a habitat at one time. The sun’s dwindling gravity has allowed mars to drift to far for life to survive there. Next Earth will drift someday (if the Sun doesn’t implode first) and Venus we will be the lucky one. In fact I think the suns fading core will end earths life support faster then Earth losing it’s own core. I base this on Mars and other planets still having their core active beyond the life support distance tot he sun.
But I also wonder if oil is a lubricant for the earths core and we are sucking it dry. This of course would mean fossil fuels are a myth and oil comes from the earth’s lava core and simply grabs fossils and junk on the way to the earths service. If this is true then we might kill our core before the Sun allows us to drift out of the life supporting distance to the sun.
I also question why asteroid’s do not have gravity, they only have trails which are caused from the vacuum of flying though space. I base this on comets only having trailing matter if it had gravity you would see matter off to the sides or even in front.
As for Einstein’s theory, it’s still a little to heavy for me to challenge. Once you enter the world of Quantum mechanics ideas can get really out there and have no proximity for cross or fact checking. I have watched the secret, but I have my own explanation for self manifestations.
So if my theory is true then the Earth has a deadline three different ways (Sun Core Loss, Natural Earth Core Loss, Unnatural Earth Core Loss), and eventually life will ultimately lose support either way. In which case we will need to move to a new planet. Now whether god will re-locate us or we will need to master space travel we will just have to decide when time is more of the essence.
As for now I just wanted try and close two questions we should of figured out long ago.
- The core of the planet is a generator for gravity.
- Gravity simply exists on planets and stars because their cores are still active.
- The sun is one big exposed super-core.
Interstellar Spaceflight (hyperspeed)
Jan 20th
Actually, we already have space craft venturing into interstellar space. Pioneer and Voyager probes, 2 each, have reached the sun’s escape velocity and are now forever outward bound. The fastest, Voyager 1, is traveling at 62,000 kilometers per hour (39,000 mph). Even at that tremendous speed it’s painfully slow when interstellar distances are involved. Voyager 1 would take over 17,000 years to get Proxima Centuari, our nearest neighbor at 4.22 light years distance.
With a theoretical speed limit imposed by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity at 1,079,252,848.8 km/h, or the speed of light, even the closest stars are very far away indeed.
But if you take in to consideration the rapid pace of technological advancement, things look brighter. The Wright brothers’ first feeble flights advanced to a man on the moon in just 50 years. In less than 100 years, we can travel 1,000 times faster. If this rule holds true for the next hundred years, we will be able to travel to the nearest stars with relative ease.
Predicting this future, however, is not easy. We simply lack even the basic theories to travel at above light speed making the engineering of an interstellar drive even further away. There are however, some interesting ideas on the drawing board that are within current theoretical limits.
A study by NASA in 1998 identified 3 potential propulsion technologies that might enable exploration beyond our solar system. Antimatter, fusion and light sails.
Light sails currently are the most technologically viable of the three. Robert L. Forward, scientist and science fiction writer first proposed them in 1984. The basic idea is to use huge lasers to push an object out of the solar system. Although it sounds strange to think of light pushing an object, photons do exert a very small force over objects they hit. Since the force it small, the object needs to be both large and lightweight – like a sail. It also needs to be reflective as only photons bouncing off an object impart velocity – absorbed photons generate heat. To prevent the heat from building up, the backside of the sail needs to be an effective radiator.
Because photons exert a tiny force even over a large area, the sail must be large indeed. However, since space is virtually empty, there is very little drag. This means any imparted velocity is incremental – a tiny push over a long period equals one big push.
The sail material could be some form of Mylar – both thin and strong. Steering the sail and aiming the huge lasers, however, are not trivial problems. By huge lasers, think 10 gigawatts shining on a 1 kilometer in diameter sail just to send a 16 gram payload to the closest star. The laser must be precisely aimed on target for as long as possible to get the desired velocities. According to its inventor, this light-powered ship could make it to the next star in only ten years.
This technology also scales up to allow for larger payloads but laser power levels quickly become gargantuan. To send a 1,000 ton ship with a crew to the same destination would require a 1,000 kilometer sail driven by a 10 million gigawatt laser – ten thousand times more than the power used on all the Earth today.
These sails have been tested: On August 9, 2004 Japanese ISAS successfully deployed two prototype solar sails in low Earth orbit. A clover type sail was deployed at 122 km altitude and a fan type sail was deployed at 169 km altitude. Both sails used 7.5 micrometer thick film. They used the force of the sun’s photons as propulsion rather than a large laser.
Faster speed could be achieved by fusion motors. Unfortunately, unlike light sails, fusion has yet to be sufficiently well understood to use as a propulsion device. Not for want of billions of dollars in funding to study it, however. Someday soon we may have the ability to control the same reaction that drives our sun. Fusion liberates tremendous energy from a given mass making it ideal for long voyages when fuel weight becomes the critical factor.
One interesting idea is the Bussard ramjet first proposed in 1960 by the American physicist RW Bussard. Rather than bring fuel, why not get it from space?
Although commonly perceived to be empty, interstellar space has a minuscule amount of hydrogen gas – at a density of about one or two atoms per cubic centimeter. Bussard’s idea is to scoop this gas up using electromagnetic force fields that extend outwards in front of the spacecraft. This field would need to be absolutely gigantic – upwards of 50,000 kilometers in diameter. Shipboard superconducting coils would steer interstellar gas towards the ship compressing it until the density was enough to produce usable fuel. In order to start this collection process the ship would already need substantial velocity – on the order of 3 to 4% light speed.
A Bussard ramjet could conceivably achieve a constant 1g acceleration that would allow the pilot to make very long journeys. To an Earthbound observer, such a ship would take hundreds of thousands of years to reach the center of the galaxy. But because of relativistic time dilation, only 20 years would pass for the crew on the ship. Imagine – just 20 years to the center of the galaxy! Of course, technical problems remain such as force field drag, shielding the crew from interstellar radiation and the ability to control fusion reactions.
Even farther off technically is the antimatter drive. When matter and antimatter come in to proximity, they annihilate each other releasing even more energy than fusion.
A fusion based propulsion unit could generate 100 trillion joules per kilo of fuel – respectable when considering that it would be 10 million times more efficient than chemical rockets. Matter-antimatter reactions, however, dwarf all other reactions. Imagine a drive could generate 20 quadrillion joules per kilo of reaction mass. That’s enough power form one kilo to supply the world’s needs for about 25 minutes.
Technical problems include lack of fuel – the world supply is a few dozen nanograms a year, fuel handling – you can easily predict the catastrophic results of an antimatter fuel accident – and reaction control.
All these technologies are as far away now as the atomic bomb was to Alfred Nobel – the inventor of TNT. That is to say, not very. We may see the beginnings of an interstellar spaceflight program before the end of the millennium. We will simply need a compelling reason.
To contemplate seriously reaching the nearest stars, we need to understand the hurdles involved. First, there is the enormous cost involved in deploying any of the understood technologies. Second, despite UFO enthusiast’s beliefs, there is no hard evidence that we have ever been visited by alien spacefarers. Third, we know we can send radio waves to these destinations without problems.
With this in mind, it may simply be too expensive and technically difficult to travel in interstellar space. A better solution has been proposed: why not create an intergalactic Internet? Send small, self-replicating research probes to other stars. Once there, they build copies of themselves and continue to explore outwards, relaying a steady stream of information back to Earth.
These self-replicating probes, also known as Von Neumann machines, are named after their inventor, mathematician John Von Neumann (1903-1957). The beauty of this idea is once you manage to construct the first self-replicating machine, the rest is automatic. The probes would expand into space geometrically, spreading rapidly to fill the whole galaxy. Once established, this network could be used for communication and localization of new Earthlike planets to colonize.
As of now, building machines that work well unassisted remain a problematic task for even the best scientists if recent unmanned mission failures are any indication. A self-repairing and self-replicating robotic probe seems distant indeed.
Travel in interstellar space represents a huge challenge to humankind. For now, it remains in the realm of science fiction – but soon, who knows? We may yet live to see the first missions to nearby stars – that is if the last 100 years of history is any guide.
The Power of Unconscious Thought
Nov 26th
Does The Power of Unconscious Thought Result in Creative Problem-Solving?
No doubt many of us have all experienced a situation where, after long hours of trying to solve a certain problem, we give up, and go get a break, only to come back and solve the problem within moments. This appears to be a somewhat commonplace situation. However, the science behind it is much more complex.
According to the authors of the study – Professor Adam Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management, Chen-Bo Zhong from the University of Toronto and Ap Dijkstererhuis of Radboud University Nijmegen – unconscious thought results in creative problem-solving in a two step process.
But this is not as simple as having an “Aha!” moment and moving on. The trio note that while the distraction might be helpful in coming up with the solution, a period of steady thought must follow so as to understand the solution and how those solutions can be applied. Similarly, while such moments might be useful in dealing with particularly tricky problems, easier problems should be confronted the old fashion way.
The researchers conducted two experiments to test their idea. In the first experiment, 94 subjects participated in a Remote-Association Test (RAT), which tests for creativity. In this test, participants were presented with three words (a triad) and were asked to come up with a fourth word that is linked with all three words. For example, if presented with the words cheese, sky and ocean, the correct answer would be blue (blue cheese, blue sky, blue ocean).
Subjects were shown nine very difficult triads (but were instructed not to solve them yet) and were then divided into groups. For five minutes following the RAT, participants were either concentrating on the triads they had just seen (the conscious thought group) or engaging in a test completely unrelated to the RAT (the unconscious thought group).
Following the five-minute interval, all of the subjects participated in a lexical decision test. During this test, subjects were shown sequences of letters and had to indicate as quickly as possible if the sequences were English words or not. The sequences presented included answers to the RAT triads, random words and non-words. Finally, subjects were again shown the RAT items and had to write down their answers.
The second experiment involved 36 subjects and had a similar set up to the previous experiment, although the RAT triads presented were much easier to solve compared to those in the first experiment.
The results pointed to members of the unconscious thought group in the lexical decision test as having much faster responses to the letter sequences. The RAT problems however saw both groups poll equally well.
“Conscious thought is better at making linear, analytic decisions, but unconscious thought is especially effective at solving complex problems,” said Galinsky and his co-authors. “Unconscious activation may provide inspirational sparks underlying the ‘Aha!’ moment that eventually leads to important discoveries.”
How to Improve Your Self-Control
Nov 26th
Temptation comes in many forms, often so potent, so animal, that it seems impossible to resist. Eating too much, drinking too much, spending too much or letting the heart rule the head. We get instant messages from deep in the gut that resonate through the mind, trying to dictate our behaviour.
One of humanity’s most useful skills, without which advanced civilisations would not exist, is being able to engage our higher cognitive functions, our self-control, to resist these temptations. Psychologists have found that self-control is strongly associated with what we label success: higher self-esteem, better interpersonal skills, better emotional responses and, perhaps surprisingly, few drawbacks at even very high levels of self-control (Tangney et al., 2004).
People, being only human, find the constant battle with basic urges is frequently too great and their self-control buckles. However, recent experimental research by Dr Kentaro Fujita at Ohio State University and colleagues has explored ways of improving self-control, where it comes from and why it sometimes deserts us.
Based on new research, along with studies conducted over the past few decades, Dr Fujita and colleagues have proposed that abstract thinking and psychological distance are particularly important in self-control.
1. Evidence that abstract thinking improves self-control
It never ceases to amaze just how different two people’s views of exactly the same event can be: one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist. But the way in which we view people or events isn’t just constrained by unchangeable patterns of thought that are set in stone. Dr Fujita and colleagues explored the idea that simple manipulations of how we construe the world can have a direct effect on self-control. Their hunch was that thinking from a more abstract, high-level perspective increases self-control.
In their research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Fujita et al. (2006) used a number of experiments to test the idea that self-control is affected by how we construe or interpret events. The problem for the researchers was manipulating aspects of people’s construal without them realising: this required some deception.
In one of Fujita et al.’s (2006) studies participants were told they were going to take part in two separate experiments – one on personality and another billed as a student survey. In fact this was just a cover story as the two pieces of research were designed to work together.
Experimenters used the ’student survey’ as a cover to manipulate levels of construal. They needed participants to be thinking in either a high-level way (abstract – seeing the whole forest) or a low-level way (concrete – seeing individual trees). They did this by getting participants to think about their level of physical health, but in two different ways:
* High-level construal condition: participants were asked to fill in a diagram which encouraged them to think about why they maintain good physical health. Participants tended to put answer such as: “To do well in school.” This got them thinking about ends rather than means – the ultimate purpose of physical health.
* Low-level construal condition: in contrast participants in this condition were asked to think about how they maintained their physical health. Naturally they responded with things like: “Go exercise”. In other words they focused on means rather than ends, the actual process.
Just before this manipulation of construal level, in a study they were misinformed was separate, participants were told their personality was being tested physiologically through holding a handgrip. This handgrip was designed to be difficult to squeeze together but participants were told to hold on as long as possible. This provided a baseline measurement of their grip strength.
Just after the manipulation of construal level participants had dummy electrodes attached to their arm and were told that their personality could be measured while they squeezed the stiff handgrip again. This time, though, they were told that the longer they could squeeze the handgrip the more accurate the information would be. The question was: how well could participants forget the temporary discomfort of holding the handgrip once they had been told about the desired goal of getting information about their own personalities?
The results confirmed Fujita et al.’s (2006) suspicions. They showed that participants in the low-construal thinking condition (thinking about means rather than ends) held on to the handgrip for, on average, 4.9 seconds less than they had during the baseline measurement.
In contrast those in the high-construal condition held on for 11.1 seconds longer than their baseline measurement. Whether participants were thinking about means or ends had a really significant effect on how long they squeezed the handgrip. Those participants who had been encouraged to think in high-level, abstract terms demonstrated greater self-control in enduring the discomfort of the handgrip in order to receive more accurate personality profiles.
Along with this design Fujita et al. (2006) also carried out other studies using different measures of self-control and different ways of inducing either high-level or low-level construal. These produced similar findings. People in the high-level construal condition were consistently:
* More likely to avoid the temptation of instant gratification.
* Prepared to make a greater investment to learn more about their health status.
* Less likely to evaluate temptations like beer and television positively.
2. How personality and the situation affect self-control
Self-control is not just affected by how we are thinking at a specific moment, that would be too easy. We have each developed different amounts of self-control. Some people seem to find it easy to resist temptation while others can be relied on to always yield to self-gratification. To a certain extent we have to accept our starting point on the self-control sliding scale and do the best we can with it.
Although a few people have very high (or very low) levels of self-control, two-thirds of us lie somewhere near the middle: sometimes finding it easy to resist temptation, other times not. Naturally the exact situation has a huge effect on how much self-control we can exert. One property of different situations central to self-control that psychologists have examined is ‘psychological distance’.
Research reveals that people find it much easier to make decisions that demonstrate self-control when they are thinking about events that are distant in time, for example how much exercise they will do next week or what they will eat tomorrow (Fujita, 2008). Similarly they make much more disciplined decisions on behalf of other people than they do for themselves. People implicitly follow the maxim: do what I say, not what I do.
It’s not hard to see the convergence between the idea of ‘psychological distance’ and high-level construal. Both emphasise the idea that the more psychological or conceptual distance we can put between ourselves and the particular decision or event, the more we are able to think about it in an abstract way, and therefore the more self-control we can exert. It’s all about developing a special type of objectivity.
3. How to improve your self-control
Fujita et al.’s (2006) studies, along with other similar findings reported by Fujita (2008), suggest that self-control can be increased by these related ways of thinking:
* Global processing. This means trying to focus on the wood rather than the trees: seeing the big picture and our specific actions as just one part of a major plan or purpose. For example, someone trying to eat healthily should focus on the ultimate goal and how each individual decision about what to eat contributes (or detracts) from that goal.
* Abstract reasoning. This means trying to avoid considering the specific details of the situation at hand in favour of thinking about how actions fit into an overall framework – being philosophical. Someone trying to add more self-control to their exercise regime might try to think less about the details of the exercise, and instead focus on an abstract vision of the ideal physical self, or how exercise provides a time to re-connect mind and body.
* High-level categorisation. This means thinking about high-level concepts rather than specific instances. Any long-term project, whether in business, academia or elsewhere can easily get bogged down by focusing too much on the minutiae of everyday processes and forgetting the ultimate goal. Categorising tasks or project stages conceptually may help an individual or group maintain their focus and achieve greater self-discipline.
These are just some examples of specific instances, but with a little creativity the same principles can be applied to many situations in which self-control is required. Ultimately these three ways of thinking are different ways of saying much the same thing: avoid thinking locally and specifically and practice thinking globally, objectively and abstractly, and increased self-control should follow.
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